My salad didn't look nearly as pretty as the one in this photo from allrecipes.com. But I bet it tasted just as good.

I got out of the office briefly yesterday for a visit with Rick and Richard Walker, who run a small tomato and cucumber farm in Edinboro. I went to see what they do for an upcoming story about local produce in supermarkets. At the end of the interview, I finally had to ask the question I’d been wanting to ask the whole time: Could I taste a tomato? They laughed and gladly handed me a ripe one. There were no knives or plates in the greenhouse, so I just took a bite. I’ll tell you this: It was about 800 times better than anything they can bring in from California. They got me a few paper towels and I tried to keep the juice from dripping off my chin and onto my shirt. Miraculously, the shirt survived, which is more than I can say for the tomato. They also gave me a couple of their English cucumbers, and I gladly hauled one home pondering what to do with it. I had planned to make fresh tomato sauce for pasta last night, but I didn’t really have enough tomatoes, and that would leave the poor cucumber sitting lonely on the counter. So I headed for allrecipes.com to find a tasty-looking recipe for cucumber, tomato and onion salad. The cucumber’s deep green color had penetrated the flesh, which had a dense flavor, not all watery and white. The tomatoes (mine this time) seemed pleased to be of service. I even used a few of my own onions, which, for some reason, never got bigger than a ping pong ball. The salad was a hit with my husband, who ate half the batch himself, and it made me feel a lot less guilty about putting that frozen pizza in the oven.